Can pragmatics and especially conversational implicature contribute to the semantic(i.e. conventional, truth-conditional, and propositional) content of a sentence uttered? During the ‘Golden Age of Pure Pragmatics'(GAPP), the answer to this question was straightforwardly negative. In other words, pragmatic intrusion into the semantic content of what is said is not allowed. But time has moved on. It has now been generally accepted in both the philosophy of language and linguistics that contra this ‘received' view, pragmatics and in particular conversational implicature or a variant of it like explicature or impliciture can encroach upon the semantic content of a sentence uttered, and to a less extent that some conversational implicatures may not be cancelled. This article presents a critical discussion and a neo-Gricean analysis of pragmatic and especially conversational implicatural penetration into the semantic content of a sentence uttered, focusing on what Levinson has called intrusive constructions.
In this article,two types of anaphora—(i)null subjects and(ii)long-distance reflexivisation— will be briefly compared and contrasted between Chinese and some Germanic,Romance,and Slavic languages,showing how they are different typologically.Following Huang(2000a,2013a),utilising intra-sentential anaphora as a testing ground,I shall re-hypothesise that languages in the world can roughly be divided into two groups:syntactic and pragmatic.Finally,I shall outline an analysis of long-distance reflexivisation in Chinese in terms of my neo-Gricean pragmatic theory of anaphora.
